


In June under the Stars

by potatoesanddreams



Category: The Hobbit - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: (very oblique ones), Bittersweet, Feels, Gen, Late Night Conversations, Melancholy, Rivendell | Imladris, Singing, The Silmarillion References
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-08
Updated: 2020-12-08
Packaged: 2021-03-09 23:54:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,536
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27961112
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/potatoesanddreams/pseuds/potatoesanddreams
Summary: Bilbo listens to an Elvish song and is rather overcome.
Relationships: Bilbo Baggins & Elrond Peredhel
Comments: 13
Kudos: 29
Collections: Have A Happy Hobbit Holiday 2020





	In June under the Stars

**Author's Note:**

  * For [CateWolfe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CateWolfe/gifts).



The Elves were singing tonight. They were always singing, of course, but this was different – not a sudden laughing chorus like a spring rain, there and gone again before you could fetch your umbrella (not, of course, Bilbo thought absently, that in the case of the Elves you would want your umbrella at all), but rather a deep river of music running on and on forever beneath the starlight. It drew him toward the singers almost without his willing it, and it was with a little jolt of surprise that he felt the night-breeze on his face and realized he had come out into the courtyard.

The moon was a silver penny above the shadowed outline of the hills. The stars burned bright in the velvet sky, shadowed only by little wisps of cloud that passing before them made them seem to flicker like candle-flames. The paving-stones of the courtyard were shining too, a soft reflected silver-gray, and all the light of the nighttime seemed to gather around the group of Elves who sang among the beds of night-blooming flowers.

Bilbo went closer.

The sound of their voices drifted on the air like incense; he could breathe it in. He could not understand the language in which they were singing, but that did not seem to matter; still he saw the things they sang of, fiercely vivid, as immediate as the night around him. High cliffs over deep waters – the steady wind – ships like horses, galloping with the wind at their backs, running with the waves – waves topped with foam that gathered and grew, and leapt high with the dancing wind, and curling over itself fell down at last to merge with the green-blue Sea. And the waves swept away everything Bilbo had ever heard about the untrustworthiness of boats, and the perils of venturing out over deep water, and his heart yearned for sea-wind and sea-spray, and the taste of salt on his lips.

Then the song changed. It carried Bilbo to dry land, to a strip of glittering beach beyond which there rose a great green hill. Atop the hill there stood a city, and it too glittered like a jewel, its moon-white towers reaching up, up, up towards the summer-bright sun. And the song came up to the city gates, that gleamed brightly silver but were studded with gems of all colors that flashed in the sun. And the song crescendoed, and the gates swung open, and joy spilled forth, so potent that it came near to breaking Bilbo’s heart. It was a golden eternity wrapped in a moment – and then the song changed once again, and here he was in Elrond’s courtyard with the night-breeze on his face and the white moonlight shining on the paving-stones, while a lone singer’s voice, high and clear and piercingly sweet, trembled in the air around him. Hope, he thought, suddenly and unaccountably. Hope and a promise…

The singer’s voice tapered slowly into silence, leaving only its sweetness lingering on the air.

Bilbo found that he was trembling. His eyes stung, and he reached for his pocket-handkerchief, only to discover that it had absconded from his pocket. O dear! he thought – and the dwarves have already lost such a lot of them. If this goes on we will have none left of all the ones Gandalf brought, and no chance of getting more until goodness knows when. I wonder if the Elves have any they might give us.

The breeze rustled in the leaves, sounding like moving water. Bilbo swallowed a lump in his throat that had nothing at all to do with pocket-handkerchiefs. Green waves, he thought, and shining beaches. He wondered whether he could find the lost handkerchief, and how long he would have to spend looking for it first. Rivendell was not a small place.

Green waves, and the sunlight on the Sea.

Suddenly he felt that there was a great contradiction in life, pocket-handkerchiefs on one side and the Sea on the other – and it was nonsense, he knew, but still he felt it tear the heart of him, that these things could _be_ in the same world, at the same time, and both belong. Or was it that he himself had to belong to one or the other, and wanted both? He did not know. He did not understand his own thoughts, and he was quite, quite certain they were only nonsense, but –

“Bilbo?”

He spun around. Elrond had come through the archway into the courtyard.

He was robed in silver like the moon, and he was taller even than Big Folk ought to be, but his expression was kind and somehow homelike. As Bilbo looked up at him, his brow furrowed with concern. “You’re weeping.”

Bilbo touched his face. He had thought he was as yet only in danger of shedding tears, but his fingertip came away wet from his cheek. Elrond dug about a little in his robes. “Here,” he said, “have my handkerchief.”

So Elves _did_ use them. That was something. Bilbo dried his face on the red silk square. “I am much obliged,” he said, and wondered at the shaking of his voice.

Elrond took back the proffered handkerchief, and stood looking at Bilbo in silence for a moment. Bilbo was just getting the urge to fidget when the half-Elf said, “Will you come and sit with me on the terrace awhile?”

Bilbo was not certain whether he wanted to do so or simply to go to bed, but he nodded.

Elrond led him back inside and up to the second floor, where a wrought-iron gate let them out onto the terrace. Like the courtyard it was paved in marble, and the moonlight was like milk spilled across the stone. Elrond offered Bilbo a chair, but himself did not sit; he went over to the balustrade at the edge of the terrace and leaned against it, looking out at the river. Bilbo began to wonder whether he was expected to come up with polite conversation, but the silence between them was somehow so comfortable that his worry found no purchase in him, and died away. He sat quietly for a while, trying to sort out his thoughts.

“Is it quite ordinary,” he said at last, “to – to _see_ things when Elves sing – like that?”

Elrond nodded. “It is not exactly _seeing_ ,” he said, “but I have heard that some experience it so. It is a – quality of the music.” He paused. A breath of wind carried past the scent of jasmine. “Do you know,” he said with a small laugh, “the first time I heard such singing I sat down where I was and wept my heart out for half an hour?" He gave a little sigh. “I was very young then. But most, I think, who have not heard it before are overwhelmed by it, whether they are children or no. If my folk had known one of our guests was near, they would not have been so incautious. I am sorry.”

“No,” said Bilbo at once. “No, I…” and he trailed off in confusion. It was not that he had _liked_ how the music made him feel. Not _liked,_ exactly – but something in him rebelled at the thought that not hearing it might have been better. “It was very beautiful,” he said at last, uncertainly.

Elrond turned halfway towards him, and in the moonlight Bilbo saw him smile. “Yes,” he said softly, “it was.”

Then he shook himself, as out of some private reverie, and came away from the balustrade over to Bilbo. “It is late,” he said. “Perhaps later than you know, if you were listening for a while. You must be tired. Shall I show you the way from here to your room?”

“Yes, please,” said Bilbo, and stood.

Elrond led him back inside, and through the winding halls. After they had walked a minute or two, Bilbo began to recognize his surroundings, and soon after that they reached the guest-room where he was staying.

Standing in the doorway, Bilbo began to bid Elrond good-night, and to thank him for his kindness while Bilbo had been so overcome. Then, in the middle of his sentence, he paused. There was something he wanted to understand. “How is it,” he said hesitantly, “that something so beautiful can…” _Hurt_ was not the right word, but he had no other. “Can hurt so much?”

Elrond opened his mouth to reply, and paused. His gaze flickered from Bilbo’s face to the sky-filled window on the other side of the hallway, then back again. Bilbo saw him frown in thought.

“I don’t know,” he said at last, slowly. “But I think –” He hesitated. “I think – it is because we know we are too small to hold it all at once. We know that it will leave us in the end.”

He smiled suddenly, his eyes very gentle, very bright. “But I do not think,” he said, “that we need to hold it, really. I do not think that anything good will remain lost. In the meantime..." He sighed softly. "Well, in the meantime, some things that are not music hurt like music. So we sing of them - and hope.”


End file.
